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Backyard Pests? Think of Them as Dinner

WILD NO MORE From left: moose roulade; rabbit pot pies; smoked black bear; seafood terrine, smoked goose and venison sausage topped by a yellow tomato; sparrows. Credit
Photographs by Evan Sung for The New York Times

FOR a big dinner party he gave in New York last week, Steven Rinella, who has lived in the city only since August, had trouble assembling some of the stuff he needed. He just about gave up on potassium nitrate, for example, which he wanted to use in curing a black bear ham he intended to smoke in a homemade smoker improvised from plywood and an electric hotplate. Then, at the last minute, a friend of his girlfriend’s, prowling drug stores, found a bottle with an expiration date of 1985. The druggist let her have it for nothing.

A sparrow trap that Mr. Rinella had rigged in his girlfriend’s backyard in Fort Greene, Brooklyn — a net balanced over a gas grill, with a pull-string leading through the living room window — proved highly disappointing. By the day before the party, Mr. Rinella had captured only a single unwary bird; plucked and beheaded, it now roosted in the fridge like a winged, goose-bumped golf ball. “It must be mating season or something,” Mr. Rinella said. “They’re like real jumpy.”

He had better luck with squirrels — eight in all, though one had to be rejected for mange. He caught them in the same backyard using both a mink trap and a modified rat trap. The rat trap just knocked them out, he explained. “So then I went out and thumped them with a hammer."

(Technically, the state requires that if you want a squirrel for dinner you need to hunt it, not trap it.)

Mr. Rinella, 33, is the author of “The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine,” recently released in paperback, which is the account of a yearlong project in which he attempted to prepare a 45-course meal based on Auguste Escoffier’s 1903 “Guide Culinaire,” substituting American fish and game for the many European species available to Escoffier. Most of the book, which makes occasional use of the word “dude,” as well as of terms that seldom appear in newspapers, let alone polite food writing, is preoccupied with hunting and gathering — fishing for ling cod, bow-hunting for elk, snagging pigeons from under bridges and behind air-conditioners.

The actual dishes fly by in a couple of chapters at the end, leaving the reader with the impression that not all were worth the effort, but Mr. Rinella’s project was more than just a stunt. He intended it to demonstrate that most of us have depersonalized our relationship to food, and that current regulations requiring that any game commercially sold in America must be raised on farms or ranches is actually harmful to both the farmed animals and wild ones.

“If someone were watching from a distant planet,” he writes in “The Scavenger’s Guide,” “our beliefs might look like this: domestic animals should be more wild; wild animals should be more domestic; and wild meat is good, so long as someone else kills it.”

Since finishing his book in 2005, Mr. Rinella has actually gone off Escoffier a bit. “That stuff is just so hard to do,” he explained while sautéing some rabbit legs the afternoon before the party. “Plus, people don’t eat that way anymore. All that butter and cream. You have to be hauled away in a wheelbarrow.”

That evening’s menu — a mere eight dishes, not counting appetizers — would be “informed” by the Escoffier experiment, he explained, but would have “a lot more nouveau stuff,” making use of some recipes developed by his friend Andy Radzialowski, who has actual culinary training and had flown out on the red-eye from Washington State, where he works as a chef on San Juan Island, to help with preparations.

In addition to fresh native squirrel and sparrow (Mr. Rinella had by now succeeded in trapping another), the ingredients would include frozen venison, Canada goose, cottontail rabbit, halibut, pike, Dungeness crab, elk, caribou, moose and bear, all of which Mr. Rinella and his friends had killed or caught in Michigan, where he grew up, or in Montana and Alaska, where he used to divide his time before moving to New York.

“If I’m not cooking with game, I don’t think it’s any fun,” he said. “I’d just as soon go eat in a restaurant.”

There was only one official Escoffier dish, it turned out — white wine matelote, or fish soup, made to a recipe in the “Guide,” a copy of which was propped up behind the stove — and it caused Mr. Rinella no end of worry. The problem started when, following Escoffier’s instructions, he flamed a couple of ounces of brandy and dumped them in. The result tasted awful, and Mr. Rinella didn’t know whether to blame his stock, which might have gone funny overnight, or the brandy.

“Isn’t it weird, the only screwed-up thing here is Escoffier?” he said. “That shows he doesn’t always know what he’s talking about. Sometimes he’ll tell you to do something obvious. And sometimes he’ll tell you to do something completely counterintuitive, like putting a half a cup of burned brandy in a fish stock.”

Mr. Rinella began sautéing some moose loin. “That looks pretty Frankensteiny, doesn’t it?” he said, referring to the toothpicks stitching up moose meat he had butterflied and then rolled up. “People have different attitudes toward moose, but in Alaska they talk about moose the way they talk about elk in Montana. The more questionable a game meat is, the more vehement some people get about it.”

Pretty soon the guests began arriving. They included friends, friends of friends, and one relative — Mr. Rinella’s brother Danny, an ecologist at the University of Alaska Anchorage, who was East for a conference. Rob Weisbach, the president and chief executive of Miramax Books, Mr. Rinella’s publisher, showed up, even though he said he hadn’t eaten meat in 20 years.

“You better go easy, man,” Mr. Rinella said. “You might keel over.”

Literary foodies included Bill Buford, the author of “Heat,” his account of cooking in the restaurant Babbo, and David Kamp, who wrote “The United States of Arugula,” a history of the fine dining revolution in America. The novelist Jay McInerney, who is also a wine columnist for House & Garden magazine, supplied the vino.

Photo

SMALL GAME HUNTER Steven Rinella with a sparrow he trapped, but later released, in Brooklyn.Credit
Evan Sung for The New York Times

Mr. McInerney explained that he met Mr. Rinella last fall at the Texas Book Festival in Austin, and that his offer then to pair up some wines with Mr. Rinella’s cooking was what had set the dinner in motion.

He added apologetically: “Matching wine to food is more an art than a science, and I’m kind of flying blind here.” With a limited budget, he said, he had decided to operate on the “sumo principle,” bringing along a 2001 Châteauneuf-du-Pape from Pierre Usseglio and a 2005 Hartford zinfandel — wines sufficiently heavyweight to stand up to anything.

There was also a 2001 Chianti classico from Fèlsina, which he hoped might be a good counter-puncher, and what proved to be the evening’s secret weapon: a spicy 2000 gewürztraminer from Trimbach. This was the only wine that held its own with the hasenpfeffer, or rabbit stew, and with a green salad topped with a confit of Canada goose (stewed in fat so long, Mr. Rinella said, that “this stuff is honey — you could probably light it like a candle”) and dressed with a vanilla-bean vinaigrette.

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“Not a wine in the world will go with salad,” Mr. McInerney said. “Which is why I basically don’t eat salad, except maybe at lunch sometimes. A salad for me is just a waste of an opportunity to have a good wine instead.”

First the appetizer trays were readied: venison sausage with roasted peppers and smoked cherry tomatoes; a seafood terrine of Dungeness crab claw in a mousse of Alaskan halibut and Michigan pike; smoked goose breast with a pear and ginger chutney; and a very pungent goose liver pâté on Belgian endive. (Before eating Canada goose it is a good idea to erase your image of that creature as a suburban slime machine lurking by the seventh green.)

While preparing these livers, Mr. Rinella recalled, he had to separate them from the gallbladders, and somehow squeezed one of the gallbladders the wrong way, so that a stream of whatever it is that’s inside goose gallbladder shot right into his eye. “Man, the pain was so awful, I just rolled around on the ground,” he said.

Oops, what about the birds? Weren’t they supposed to go with the appetizers? Mr. Rinella rushed to the oven and checked his rather puny flock — the two sparrows and a few mourning doves — with a meat thermometer. “I have a friend who cooks birds with the feet on,” he said, apologizing for his technique. “He knows when they’re done by how tight the grip gets.”

In due course the birds were added to the platters, where the sparrows, in particular, were not exactly fought over. David Kamp, who bravely tried one, pronounced it “duck-ish.”

Next up was the first main course: squirrel pot pies in little ramekins, with tiny rabbit Wellingtons on the side. “Not just squirrel,” Mr. Rinella said, introducing the dish. “Brooklyn squirrel — the thinking man’s chicken.”

This dish was a big hit, actually, with most of the guests exclaiming over how good squirrel proved to be — though the little pies also included wild morels and acorn squash, so that in the end it was hard to say for sure what was the taste of what.

When the next course arrived — the hasenpfeffer — a guest who had been reminiscing about Squirrel Nutkin said, “Now, who’s this?” And then she answered her own question: “Thumper.”

Thumper was followed by elk-loin carpaccio with beet salad and a blackberry balsamic reduction made from blackberries in Andy Radzialowski’s yard on San Juan Island, where they apparently grow like kudzu but on canes as tough as barbed wire.

Then the fish soup, which Mr. Radzialowski rescued with some lemon zest and a stick of butter. Hard to say whether Escoffier deserved credit or not. Mr. Rinella had intended to save the confit salad for later, but at the last second decided to wheel it out now, as a break before heading into what he called the “heavy hitters” of the evening: caribou osso buco with sun-dried tomato polenta; the moose loin, stuffed with apple and Gorgonzola cheese; and the bear ham, so smoky it smelled like peaty Scotch whiskey.

“This is like a dead zoo visit,” a guest remarked as these once stately creatures, or their carefully prepared remains, appeared on the table.

The osso buco was a little stringy, one could have said if one wanted to be fussy, but then how does one know what caribou is supposed to taste like, anyway? The moose and the bear were meaty and intensely flavorful, and seemed to knock a few of the guests into a carnivorous stupor. Eyes turned, naturally, to Mr. Weisbach, now fallen far, if temporarily, from the vegetarian wagon. He said so far, so good; no discernible ill effects.

Leaning back in his chair, Mr. Rinella told a story about visiting Vietnam recently, where he had gone to eat dog and was surprised to find that sentimental considerations got in the way of his enjoyment. He was particularly put off by something called “puppy-paw soup,” apparently much prized by young people. But all the same, he said, he was glad he had made the trip.

“I guess I don’t have a very delicate palate,” he added. “I just like stuff if it’s interesting.”

Correction: April 5, 2007

A picture caption in the Dining section yesterday with an article about a dinner of wild animals prepared by Steven Rinella, a writer, referred incorrectly to a bird Mr. Rinella was holding. It was a song sparrow, a protected species, which was later released; it was not one of the English sparrows that were cooked, and are not protected.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page F1 of the New York edition with the headline: Backyard Pests? Think of Them as Dinner. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe